Matthias Grünewald the cosmologist.

My challenging reading of Max Tegmark’s Our Mathematical Universe (Knoph, New York, 2014) made me go to the library to get a few books on our universe so I can read them peacefully in my bed. One of them was the wonderful collection of cosmos photography from the space telescope Hubble. A few photographs of nebulas, such as the Eskimo, the Orion and Cone nebulas, struck me because of their fantastic colour combinations.

Their colors made me immediately think of Matthias Grünewald’s Resurrection belonging to the Isenheim altarpiece, in fact the whole altarpiece, as if the German Renaissance artist had foreseen the images of our actual cosmos but also the prediction of parallel universes (read earlier post).

Here, a Christ in its new atomic structure, in front of his well-lit universe in an array of different colours, hovering in front of a near-earth asteroid belonging to our galaxy inhabited by the sleeping Roman soldiers. He looks very happy. That painting makes me ponder on what is physical reality and our universe. « Reality » is everything that exists; « our universe » is the part of physical reality we can in principle see. So, what did Grünewald see?

Ok… back to work! Time to finalize the planning of our June painting workshop in Tuscany!